August 28, 2025| Written by Jack Doumanian
After 10 years of making Killer Instinct merchandise, it's official - we are closing out our KI Collection.
11 years ago, it all started with a simple referral. A friend of ours casually mentioned that he knew someone who was working at Xbox Game Studios. "What game?" I asked. It was Killer Instinct - a game that I knew very well from my childhood.
I was 13 years old when one of the neighborhood kids invited me over to play the game on his Super Nintendo. We'd have mini-tournaments at his house with all the other kids on our street. My character of choice was always Jago... "The ninja guy" as I used to call him. 30 years later and he's still my go-to character.
To make things very clear, I am in no way a fighting game expert. I did not grow up in the arcades, nor would I claim that I was part of the community before Eighty Sixed. However, my love for fighting games was planted in those early years of my childhood amongst games like Killer Instinct, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. So when I discovered there was a chance to work with one of the games I grew up admiring - I was excited to jump at the opportunity.
The people at Xbox were good to us. They worked closely with our team and cheered us through every step of the design and manufacturing process. They gave us insightful feedback on our creative works, provided detailed suggestions on how to make improvements, and were enthusiastic about our collaboration. I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel like a dream. At the time, we were this tiny company of only 3 full-time employees - and a giant like Xbox / Microsoft was enthusiastic to work with us? It didn't seem real.
The Launch
In 2015, after a few months of negotiations and development, it was finally time for us to launch. It had to be EVO. What better place than the pinnacle of fighting game tournaments? The KI team had their panel and it was the first time I saw one of our products featured this way. That was our first KI shirt. The Killer Instinct "Evolution" tee.
Over the next few years we released a handful of other designs.
Timeline
Evolution T-Shirt
Release Date: July 24, 2015
The current roster featured inside of the KI Logo. We wanted to launch with something that would make a good introduction to all the products we'd be working on. So we created a t-shirt design that showcased the cast rather than focused on one character. This one is still hanging in my closet.
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Fulgore (Reactor) T-Shirt
Release Date: September 18, 2015
The "Reactor" shirt ended up becoming our most popular Killer Instinct shirt of all time. I remember how nervous we were making a design that was off centered like this one. Off-centered designs hadn't performed too well for us in the past, but fortunately, Fulgore broke the mold.
Fulgore was also one of our shirts that was featured in the game. How many of you actually remember seeing this notification when launching Killer Instinct on the Xbox?
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Thunder (Tomahawk) T-Shirt
Release Date: November 3, 2015
The amount of detail on this design is unreal. You simply had to see it in person to truly appreciate it. I was always concerned about this color choice for the shirt, but the combination worked so well. I still do wonder how well this would have been received had it been printed on a simple black tee.
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Glacius (Arctic Blast) T-Shirt
Release Date: December 8, 2015
In March of 2016, Phil Spencer was giving a keynote speech during the Microsoft BUILD conference. Imagine my surprise when I tuned in and saw him unexpectedly wearing our Glacius tee! This wasn't planned, nor was I given any notice that it would happen. I nearly fell out of my chair.
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Hisako (Onryo) T-Shirt
Release Date: April 4, 2016
The Hisako tee became our second most popular Killer Instinct t-shirt of all time. This design, along with the Fulgore shirt became staples in the community. I am yet to attend a single fighting game event and not see at least one of these in the crowd.
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Origins T-Shirt
Release Date: June 21, 2016
This shirt was designed and made specifically for the Killer Instinct promos at E3 in 2016. We teamed up with Microsoft and produced over 5000 of these to giveaway during the event! We wanted to create something that would throwback to KI's origins. This is why the "Established 1994" was a key part of the design.
It even made a special appearance during the keynote as our good friend Rukari Austin was wearing it during his speech! Seeing this shirt being worn during E3 was definitely surreal.
At the time, 5,000 t-shirts was the largest volume we had ever printed. It was the first time we had to ship orders on palettes. We didn't even have any palettes. We were truly concerned that we wouldn't be able to deliver the products on time and on budget, but fortunately - everything worked out.
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Spinal (Spectre) T-Shirt
Release Date: July 28, 2016
If I could go back in time, I would have made this one glow in the dark. I would have re-done the photoshoot, returning to the beaches of Santa Monica, but well after sunset. I think that would have made for an incredibly eerie shoot that would have been befitting for Spinal.
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Keychain Collection Wave 1
Release Date: February 24, 2017
The Killer Instinct Keychains were the second set of keychains we had ever done. We started with a small set for Skullgirls, then followed up with 6 characters from KI. We were initially pretty concerned that the chibi art style wouldn't be too appealing to KI fans, but we were fortunately proven wrong.
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Cinder (Inferno) T-Shirt
Release Date: July 27, 2017
I always said this design was fire. (Corny pun intended)
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Keychain Collection Wave 2
Release Date: December 8, 2017
Our second wave of Killer Instinct keychains arrived right before the holidays. My favorite of this batch was by far Riptor. Who wouldn't want a little pocket dinosaur to carry around with them? The only issue with this set was that the keychains' sizes weren't as uniform as we would've preferred. Look at the size difference between Riptor vs. Spinal. Needless to say, we made sure that this was never an issue with any of other keychains again.
Riptor T-Shirt
Release Date: May 16, 2018
This was the last design we released for a while. Our team went back and forth a dozen times on whether or not this should be printed on a brown t-shirt. "No body likes brown tees," everyone kept saying. Regardless, it just looked too good in this color-way, we had to take the chance.
Glacius: Cool Blue Edition
Release Date: October 28, 2023
After a few years, we started our own #BringBackKI campaign. We decided to release a few of our older designs as limited edition new color-ways along with a handful of new products. Glacius got a cool blue version that made the design look that much colder. Fun Fact: That handsome fella in the photograph is my little brother.
Thunder: Warm Grey Edition
Release Date: October 28, 2023
In my humble opinion, the new warmer grey version of the Thunder shirt was definitely an improvement from the older color-way. This combination of colors helped the details on the design stand out much better.
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Jago T-Shirt
Release Date: November 22, 2023
We were working on a Jago design since the beginning. Unfortunately we never seemed to be able to land on something that felt right for the character. So with the launch of the #BringBackKI campaign, we decided that a Jago shirt was a priority. I may be biased, but I feel this one really hit the nail on the head.
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UltraTech Keychain
Release Date: January 3, 2024
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UltraTech Snapback
Release Date: April 19, 2024
I was surprised by how many of these I saw floating around at EVO this year. Custom designed from the ground up, our snapbacks are hands down the best caps you can find in the FGC.
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Jago & Fulgore Limited Edition Pins
Release Date: August 30, 2024
These are two of my favorite pins we've ever made. The initial plan was to launch this at the start of our #BringBackKI campaign. However, getting the details of Jago's tattoos right with such a small space on a pin proved to be difficult. This caused some significant back and forth with our supplier - which resulted in months of delays. In the end, they came out great and it was definitely worth the wait.
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UltraTech & Killer Instinct Logo Limited Edition Pins
Release Date: September 2, 2024
The final two products for our Killer Instinct collection. These weren't initially intended on being our final products for the collection, but I think it worked out regardless.
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Final Thoughts
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with this franchise. I owe so many thanks to the good people at Xbox, the artists at Eighty Sixed, everyone involved in licensing and marketing, James Goddard especially, Rukari Austin, Maximilian, and so many more. I hope you all know how much I appreciate you. But most of all, a big thank you to all of our customers who supported us, showed love for this collection, shared their feedback and helped shape our product lineup over the years. You helped us keep KI alive in our own special way.The only regret I have is that we didn't release all of the products that we had planned. Unfortunately, some of the products we designed for Killer Instinct are product categories which we are yet to announce. I hope someday in the future those products will see the light of day. For now, they'll just have to stay buried in one of our hard drives.
Outside of those, I do wish we had created a Sabrewulf design that we loved enough to release. We had some sketches but they never really resonated with our team. An Orchid and Sadira shirt would have been great as well. Perhaps in a future blog post I'll share the sketches of some of the designs we never completed. That could certainly be interesting.
I'm not big on goodbyes. For now, let's just agree to say, "See you later!" I truly believe that one day we'll see another sequel to Killer Instinct, and when that day comes, we hope to be right there making an entirely new lineup of products you will all enjoy for years to come. #PlayKI
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